2002 to 2005, Portland, Oregon

By Marcia Klotz

My four-year old twins, Samara and Jacob, spend most of their day in a make-believe world only the two of them inhabit, filled with pirates, fairies, and lots of “weddin’s.” If you were to visit our house and see them chase each other around the dinner table, you would never guess that they spent the first three months of their existence immobilized in a cryogenic freezer. They were the lucky ones, plucked at random by a lab technician, thawed, and inserted in my uterus. Eight others were left in the freezer.

My husband and I first visited a fertility specialist when I was 38, after two long years of trying to get pregnant. As it turned out, one of my fallopian tubes was blocked completely, the other badly scarred. The humiliation and pain that overwhelmed me in the wake of that diagnosis took me completely by surprise. When I finally came to terms with it, we discussed what to do. Lee wanted to try fertility treatment; I wanted to adopt. Eventually, he persuaded me. There was something in me, I had to admit, that yearned for the experience of feeling another life take shape within my own body.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves extracting eggs from a woman’s ovaries. They don’t just harvest the one or two eggs that naturally ripen in the course of a menstrual cycle. You have to take fertility drugs that encourage the ovaries to produce a whole bunch of eggs, which are then surgically removed. I was lucky; they took 21 of my eggs. In a Petri dish (”in vitro” means “in glass”) those eggs are then fertilized with sperm cells. The ones that successfully develop into embryos are grown for three to five days, and then either reintroduced directly into the uterus or frozen.

We shuffled through a fair amount of paperwork before we began. One of the forms that crossed our desk asked what we would do with any excess embryos. By this time, we had seen a number of graphs showing that women my age (39 by this time) often produced very few eggs, and that our eggs were often slow to fertilize. Leftover embryos seemed the least of our worries. So we cheerfully checked the box next to “Save Embryos for Future Use,” and went on to the next form. The question didn’t seem real.

After the twins were born, exquisite, perfect, and maddeningly overwhelming in their dual neediness, Lee and I were certain we did not want to have any more children. Still, we did not have a clear sense of what to do with the remaining embryos that remained frozen at the fertility clinic. Should we donate them to science? Make them available to another couple that could not conceive naturally? Or should we allow them to be thawed — a euphemism for a process that effectively ends their “life” (to the extent that a cryogenically frozen being can be said to be “alive” at all)? Our extraordinary little babies, all warm and wriggly, made that question far more agonizing than I could ever have anticipated. This was not just a decision about what to do with a few clumps of cells. Those embryos had become more than that.

Jake and Sami were a year old when we received a letter from the fertility clinic, requesting a decision. Did we want to pay the $75 in storage fees to keep our remaining eight embryos frozen for another year, or did we have other plans for them? I remember opening the letter and reading it aloud as Lee changed Jake’s diaper, Sami crawling around on the carpet at his feet. Our eyes met, helpless and bewildered. We knew we couldn’t keep those embryos on ice forever. But we simply didn’t have the mental space to focus on such a momentous decision. The next day, we packed the twins up in their car seats and headed down to the clinic to pay the bill for another year of storage.

By the time that same letter arrived a year later, our lives had become even more hectic. We had just brought our third child home from the hospital. Rona was conceived naturally, as an enormous surprise, when I was 42. Apparently, my fallopian tubes were in better shape than the doctors thought. This time around, we had still less energy for the question of how to deal with those frozen embryos, though we were even more certain that we would not be using them ourselves.

I have a vague memory of seeing the fertility clinic envelope in a stack of mail and knowing, without opening it, what was inside. I couldn’t think about it. A few months later, when my head cleared a little, I searched the house, but the letter was gone. I wanted to call the fertility clinic, but then I held off. I didn’t have a clear sense yet of what to tell them.

In the long nights of Rona’s first six months, as I hovered in that gray, new-baby space between sleep and wakefulness, the frozen embryos haunted me. I started researching what they were and what might happen to them. They were no bigger, I discovered, than the dot over the letter “i” here on this page, yet I felt a protective kind of love growing inside me. If not for the arbitrary choice of some lab technician, my house might be shared with one or two of them, rather than Sami and Jake. I started to take them seriously as potential human beings, as members of my family. What, in good conscience, could we do with them?

First, I looked into the possibility of donating them to other infertile couples. Fertility clinics, it turns out, treat embryos strictly as “genetic material.” All donations have to be made anonymously. We would have no say in where our child might be raised, no chance to ever make contact. I felt tormented by the possibility that someone I had brought into the world might come into a home that might make her unhappy.

The question quickly became very political. About that time, as part of a publicity campaign to oppose stem cell research, George Bush posed in the White House with some children born through the Snowflakes Program. Snowflakes coordinates what they call “embryo adoptions.” I called up their website, and was surprised to discover that I liked some of what I found there. Snowflakes treats each frozen embryo as a “pre-born child.” As a long-time supporter of abortion rights, I find that designation heinous. But as someone trying to decide what to do with my own frozen embryos, I liked the fact that Snowflakes applies the same procedure to embryo donation as is generally used for open adoption. After a home study, any prospective family would create a portfolio. We would be able to choose from among different family portfolios, and we could maintain contact with any children born.

But despite those positive points, Snowflakes was not to become our agency. Their appeals to “adoptive parents” are aimed, quite explicitly, at born-again Christians. My family, in contrast, is Jewish-agnostic and politically leftist. The chances that we would find a good match through Snowflakes hovered close to zero. Nevertheless, I fired off an email asking whether Snowflakes knew of any Jewish couples that might be interested in our embryos. I never heard back.

Well then, what about giving them to science? Here, the research got complicated. Our fertility clinic uses most of the donated embryos in its own laboratory, trying to perfect things like thawing techniques and storage media. While our own success in conceiving the twins certainly owed much to the generosity of past donors, I could not quite imagine giving over our embryos for that purpose. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like offering up my own housepets for scientific study. Now, under certain circumstances, I might be willing. If Lee or one of the kids faced a life-threatening condition, and only the life of Moxie, the cat, could save them — that sort of thing. But would I give our embryos to the fertility clinic to improve on their already impressive success rates? No.

But what about stem cell research? If we so requested, the clinic would send our embryos to a lab in Wisconsin for just that purpose. Now, here the possible benefits are truly staggering. Stem cells could hold the cure to any number of life-threatening diseases, from diabetes to epilepsy and some forms of cancer. For a number of people suffering from terminal illnesses or debilitating conditions, stem cell research offers the only serious hope.

That seemed like a clear mandate at first, the only ethical choice. But when I looked into the various labs around the country and what they actually do with the stem cells, I hesitated. Much of the research involves the production of chimeras — animals whose own genetic material has been mixed with that of humans, in order to create an animal with human cells or organs. I discovered that sheep were being raised in Nevada with human kidneys. And an ethics panel at Stanford had just approved a research application from a scientist who wanted to produce mice with an unlimited percentage of human brain cells.

Theoretically, I understand the enormous good that could come from precisely that kind of research. Stem cells could repair the brain cells damaged in a stroke, or lost to Alzheimer’s. Still, the thought of those mice made me shudder. It’s hard to imagine the “human cells” in that experiment as coming from one of our embryos. That little frozen dot might have developed into somebody who could look a lot like Samara. Instead, it would be growing inside a mouse’s tiny skull. It would think, and its thoughts would be mouse thoughts. No. I just couldn’t do it.

Finally, I placed the call. A woman’s voice answered, then left the phone to check the records. She returned to inform me, in a bureaucratic voice, that our embryos had been discarded just a few months after Rona’s birth. When the clinic did not hear back from us, they had assumed we were no longer interested in keeping the embryos in storage. At first I was outraged; how could they take such a momentous leap without even calling us by phone? But by the end of the day, my anger had ebbed. After all, I had called to tell her that we had made a decision. It was time to thaw the embryos, to let them die. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us like the only loving choice.

Marcia Klotz lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and three children. She teaches courses in English and Women’s Studies at Portland State University.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, October 27th, 2006 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 12:01 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.